Alexander Vustin was born in Moscow in 1943. He studied composition first with Grigory Fried at a regional music college, and then with Vladimir Feré at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, graduating in 1969. Between 1969 and 1974, Vustin worked as a music editor at USSR Radio. Since 1974 he has been working as an editor in the Kompositor publishing house.
Vustin's compositions are grounded in basic ideas, on the imagery and message of a work, the gradual and purposeful development of which takes into account all of the temporal and spatial structure of the work. Talking about this he said: "In this case both performers and listeners become participants in a certain action, the meaning of which they clearly understand, but cannot express in words." This approach to music as to an "effective action" is manifest in his creativity in general. Vustin's musical language is distinctive by the remarkable organization of its musical texture. Influenced by the twelve-tone procedure, he devised his own system of 12-fold restatement of tonal series in which a whole musical fragment represents a "tone," which is the smallest unit of measure. Different permutations of this initial unit form series of the highest order. As this demonstrates, Vustin is a composer with an individual world outlook.